Hello fellow Hardware Enthusiasts!
It is currently June 30th, AMD has just released the RX480 which is selling well. As for the RX470 and RX460, they seem to be simply put, "coming soon". After Nvidia's 16nm Pascal architecture rolled around a month ago, AMD was left with some big shoes to fill, and this thread will hopefully cover their efforts to fill or perhaps even surpass expectations using their 14nm Polaris architecture. Naturally as tech news goes, the rumor mills are running full time, and thus this thread is likely to change if better/ newer reasonably believable information is available.
The current lineup of Polaris cards is divided into Polaris 10 and 11. Like Nvidia, this seems to reflect the lower number = bigger chip idea, thus, Polaris 10 is the higher performance card, while polaris 11 will be for more mid range.Currently AMD has announced 3 cards:
The Rx 480 470 and 460 in lessening price and performance respectively.
So without Further ado...
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Polaris 10
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Rx480 MSRP:$199 4GB/$239 8GB
The core:
2304 Stream Processors (R9 290X/390X has 2816)
32 ROPs ( Render OutPut Units)
144 TMUs (Texture Mapping Units)
1266 MHz base clock
RAM: 4GB or 8 GB of GDDR5 RAM on a 256 bit memory bus. The 4GB card uses Memory clocked at 7 GHz effective which translates to around a 224GB/s bandwidth, while the 8 GB card ships with an 8GHz effective speed. This should mean a memory bandwidth of 256GB/s
Compute performance: 5.8 Trillion Floating Point Operations Per Second Peak ( R9 290X is 5.6)
Power: 150 W TDP
This power comes from the up to 75W that both the PCIE Slot ( and thus motherboard) and six pin PCIE power cable are rated to supply.
This means that the PCIE slot will have to supply power in order to fully power the card, however, there are current issues that would imply the card is taking excessive power from the PCIE slot as seen in this forum's Rx 480 review
Comparisons are made to the R9 290X, as this is AMD's current non Fiji flag ship card, and now sells for around $290 meaning that being able to beat out a R9 290X or at least tie it will mean that Polaris is indeed a successor in performance and power efficiency. Release day results show the 8GB card performing in between a R9 390 and R9 390X, so it stand to reason, that the 4GB RX480 card is under R9 290X performance which is slightly below R9 390X performance.
For a more complete review of the RX 480 here are a bunch of sites to go binge on...
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/amd-radeon-rx-480-polaris-10,4616.html
http://www.anandtech.com/show/10446/the-amd-radeon-rx-480-preview
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/06/amd-rx-480-polaris-review/
https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=RX+480&tbm=nws
For those who want video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2GdfDCq86Gk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vazL57c4nq8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lRDgiWBfs5I
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-y6Ky_pCawQ
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=RX+480
If you find more good sites, please tell me.
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Polaris 10 Pro ( cut down Polaris 10)
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RX470MSRP:$149 4GB/ $179 8GB
The Core:
2048 Stream Processors
32 ROPs
128 TMUs
1206MHz Base clock
RAM: 4GB or 8 GB of GDDR5 RAM, with the same 256 bit memory bus running at 7 GHz effective, which should result in 224GB/s memory bandwidth
Compute Performance: ~4.95 Trillion Floating Point Operations Per Second Peak ( R9 390 is 5.1)
Power: Once again a single six pin is to be used and this time the TDP should be around 110W
As this card seems to be sporting specs similar to the situation with the 970 and 980, it seems the RX 470 should fall between the R9 380X and the R9 390
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Polaris 11
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RX460MSRP:$99 2GB/$129 4GB
The Core:
1024 Stream Processors
16 ROPS
64 TMUs
Perhaps a 1400MHz core clock
RAM: 2GB or 4GB of GDDR5 running on a 128 bit memory bus running at 7GHz effective for a 112GB/s bandwidth
RX 480 power debate
Although the RX 480 had a favorable launch, it was soon noticed, that the card did not really follow its TDP recommendations and overdrew from the PCIE slot. For more on that please see here:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/amd-radeon-rx-480-polaris-10,4616-9.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZjAlrGzHAkI
While this was not going to set motherboards on fire, it certainly was a setback, so AMD had to make some fixes, as of today, here they are:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/amd-radeon-rx-480-polaris-power-fix,4668.html
The power re routing is most likely possible over a simple driver update, as the board has a very complex power delivery system.
This video here looks at the PCB design
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qG2e-v94L4M
While the reference card now draws around 10W less from the PCIE slot, making current owners more pleased, it will be interesting to see what AIB cards can do, as it seems power delivery on the board is a real limit to overclocks.
More updates to follow!